First, I apologise for not noticing that the comments had been broken for a while. This was entirely my fault and not fault of ISSO, which I’m still super happy with as a self-hosted comments system. So in this post I’m going to describe what went wrong, and also how I made the system a little more resilient at the same time.

First, what did go wrong?

My web server is using FreeBSD as its OS, with a bunch of software installed via FreeBSD’s ports system. For those not that familiar with FreeBSD’s ports, the system essentially acts like a rolling distribution. As a result, you sometimes have to upgrade tools, especially languages like Perl, Ruby, and in this case, Python. A little while ago, the default Python version on FreeBSD was upgraded from Python 3.7 to Python 3.8, and I eventually followed along with that upgrade. ISSO is run out of a virtualenv as a regular user and the virtualenv was still using Python 3.7, but I decided I didn’t want to keep multiple Python versions on this machine. So, I upgraded the version in the virtualenv to 3.8 as well. So far, so good, especially as ISSO seemed to restart without issue.

The default installation of msysgit (aka the official git client for Windows) is unfortunately built without python support. There are understandable reasons as to why this is, starting with “where the heck do I find the various python versions on Windows”. For me the problem was that I needed git-p4 to extract some code history out of a Perforce repository and guess what, git-p4 is written in Python. Only solution for me was that I had to find a way to make this work short of throwing Linux in a VM just to get a git import going.